socialnetworking

I am looking for a Social Networking Platform (LAMP preferably) - Open
Source would be ideal, which will allow the user to see a specific
template once they login, dependant upon the domain they align
themselves to during sign-up.

The user chooses an email username, which is then attached to one of
200 domain names. This domain is branded and the user sees this once
they login through the main portal.

Any pointers?

Thomas

ps: as for assigning email addresses - I am open to taking advice
here too!! :)

My company have started looking at Facebook and how it can be used as
a means of communication and advertising. Has anyone done this
effectively? Any advice? My mind is that it is good from a brand
awareness and PR point of view raising your companies profile but
advertising I am not so sure i.e. I blanket out as I am sure most
people do the right hand banner promotions found consistently on the
site.

Taking the persona discussion in a different direction. I have been
thinking lately, along the lines of how we can take advantage of the
social networking sites to develop a more realistic persona.
While this is not intended to replace the one-on-one interview to
observe and gather goals, it can be an effective
tool when it comes to humanizing the users.

Is there a good enough reason why when I want to change my profile picture
for Google, Yahoo!, Skype, LinkedIn and all the other social networks I'm a
part of (i.e. IxDA :) ), I have to go to all these places and upload the new
picture, and I can't just upload one picture to one place of my choosing?

What of the usability of this new look? What of the spacing? Is it
efficient? Are the tabs necessary? Or did you like to, with just one
look, understand a person's personal and professional life completely?

More importantly, with the myriad of complaints of said new design,
will this bring the downfall of Facebook here in the US? Into the
halls of history along with Tribe, Friendster, Orkut?

My current project is a social network. I'm actually having some trouble
putting together a good site map because so many features seem to either
overlap, or more importantly, one page will support multiple features. There
is much less of a "page" paradigm, it's so much more the interactive
behavior of the users. For example, on Facebook's profile page, I can do so
many different things - especially if I have added any applications.

Have any of you faced this, and if so, how did you tackle site mapping?

This one's for the twitter users out there.
What limitations do you face using twitter? I for one would like to be
able to see all posts from a single user in one place, be able to post
pics, have twitter convert the URL into a tinyURL before submitting
the post so I know how much more typing space is left....

Social apps are far more complex than single-user apps. I wonder to what
extent a lack of social psych research input into the design of these apps
-- the most popular ones having been designed by college undergrads -- is
causing their popularity to plateau? To me, this suggests a discontinuity
similar to the one that occurred when command line interfaces were displaced
by GUIs. Every GUI out there can trace its origins to the the
multi-disclipinary, thoroughly grounded research conducted at Xerox PARC. I
think it's possible to go only so far by the seat of one's pants.